Social Media

SAN FRANCISCO, April 28, 2009 — Co-sponsors ThePort Network, Inc. (www.theport.com), NTEN (www.nten.org), and Common Knowledge (www.commonknow.com) released today results of the nonprofit industry's first-ever survey examining the use of social networking as a marketing and fundraising channel. Conducted earlier this year, the survey polled 978 nonprofit professionals about their organizations' use of commercial social networking sites, as well as their own hosted social networking communities.

Though recent high-profile media coverage suggests that a large percentage of the US population participates in online social networking and microblogging, more than half of Americans (51%) do not use Twitter or participate in either of the two largest social networking sites - MySpace and Facebook - according to (pdf) a recent Harris Poll from Harris Interactive.

April 22, 2009, The Washington Post — It seems foolproof: nonprofits using the power of the Internet to raise money through a clever Facebook application. After all, the Web earned gobs of cash for Barack Obama's presidential campaign. And besides, going online means sending fewer fundraising letters, which makes it appealing to penny-pinchers and environmentalists alike.

April 19, 2009, The Chronicle of Philanthropy — At 2:13 am on Friday, the actor Ashton Kutcher beat out CNN to become the first Twitter user with more than 1 million followers. A notable achievement in the Twitterverse, perhaps, but an event relevant to the charity world?

As a 24-year-old who once was grounded for excessive use of MySpace and only intermittent use of my textbooks, I never imagined that someday Facebook would be listed as one of my job responsibilities. However odd it seems, I am indeed responsible for putting in face time on Facebook to expand my organization’s participation in the world of social media.

April 8, 2009, Technology Review — The web is a classic "attention economy"--a system in which people compete for attention. Ask many experts for the secret of success in such a system and they're likely to point to persistence and high quality content.

BOSTON, April 14, 2009 — Visible Measures, the independent third-party measurement firm for Internet video publishers, advertisers, and social marketers, today announced that it has entered into a comprehensive agreement to become the online video measurement platform of record for MySpace, the world's premiere social portal. By collecting detailed audience behavior data on each of the several hundred million video streams it serves every month, Visible Measures will give MySpace the ability to provide its advertising clients and content providers with best-in-class visibility into campaign performance and content effectiveness. As part of this agreement, MySpace will deploy Visible Measures' patented Internet video metrics platform and Visible Measures will be named as MySpace's official provider of digital video measurement and metrics.

April 6, 2009, Idealist — More and more nonprofits use video to get their message out about the work they do and, of course, to fundraise. For instance, there are already a lot of nonprofits on YouTube (Idealist included). But do people always see these videos and instantly connect with the idea to donate to the cause?

April 8, 2009, Inside Facebook — In celebration of hitting the 200 million user mark today, Facebook announced that it has partnered with 16 global charities/advocacy groups to create virtual gifts promoting their causes in the Facebook Gift Shop. Facebook will donate all of the proceeds from the gifts to the groups involved.

CHICAGO, April 7, 2009 — The Blog Council, the world's leading forum for large companies to share best practices in social media, announced that Bob Pearson has left Dell to become its new President. Pearson was previously Vice President of Communities and Conversations at Dell, where he oversaw the company's social media efforts worldwide.